The Kingdoms

the old gentry had changed their surnames to, during the Terror. It was the commonest slave name in the Republic now.
But he knew that lighthouse.
He took down the business directory from the high shelf. For half an hour, he searched it for anyone who might know anything about a lighthouse: architects, shipping companies, anything. He’d written down a few names and addresses when he came to a M. de Méritens, maker of engines and generators for the running of lighthouses. Not sure what exactly he wanted to ask, just that he had to ask, he set out. He kept the postcard in his pocket. He would have felt safer carrying a bomb, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave it behind.
M. de Méritens, originally of the Rue Boursault in Paris and now also of Clerkenwell, held a government contract for every lighthouse in the Republic. It said so on the gilded sign above the workshop – at the pleasure of His Majesty Napoleon IV – and on the wall below was a poster. The generators provided electricity for arc lamps of up to 800,000 candlepower, and they were guaranteed for a hundred years.
As Joe approached the main yard, steam poured out of the double gates and sparks rained down where someone was welding. The machines were monstrous, and in the vapour, some of the angles of their pipes and girders looked like elbows or spines. One of them hissed as a boy passed an experimental jet of steam through the pistons, which shot down hard. A shipment of steel floated low over Joe’s head, the crane invisible in the smoke. The smell of hot metal and coal was stronger nearer the workshop, and patches of light glowed through where the furnaces were. He asked someone about the main office and was pointed to a glass door.
M. de Méritens himself was behind a broad desk, sifting through a chaos of papers and machine parts with the determined expression of a man who insists he has a system. He was a cloudpuff of a person who must have put on weight recently, because he was still wearing a waistcoat that was too small for him. He was mumbling under his breath, a kind of gravelly bumble that didn’t sound like he knew he was doing it.
‘Hello,’ he said when Joe stepped in. ‘Here about the welding job? I’ll tell you now, it’s yours if you’re sober and you speak in sentences.’
‘No.’ Joe hesitated. ‘I have a funny thing to ask. Do you … happen to know this place?’ He showed de Méritens the postcard. He kept hold of it, his thumb covering the English message on the back.
De Méritens put on a pair of glasses. ‘The Eilean Mòr light, yes. Why is that a funny question?’
‘Do you know if anything – has happened there recently? Three months ago, say.’
‘Happened? No. It’s only just been built. How do you mean? Have you got a complaint? Christ, if you’re from the Lighthouse Board—’
‘I’m not, I’m not,’ Joe said, embarrassed. It was bizarre to talk to someone who spoke to him as though he knew things. He felt like a fraud. ‘I’m nothing to do with anything, my name’s Joe Tournier. I was found at the Gare du Roi three months ago with no memory of anything until then. But this morning, someone sent me this, and I think I know it.’
De Méritens looked intrigued. ‘You’re one of those amnesia cases? Remarkable. I don’t think I can help you, though, it’s … as I say, it’s a brand-new light. It was only finished six months ago.’
Joe frowned. ‘Brand new. Was there another lighthouse there before this one?’
‘No. Why?’
‘The …’ He had to laugh. ‘The postcard is from eighteen hundred and five.’
De Méritens had a brilliant laugh; he actually said ho ho ho. ‘Someone’s having you on, I’m afraid,’ he said.
Joe folded the postcard back into his pocket, still smiling the cinders of that first laugh. He’d known it would never be so easy as looking up an address and asking someone. He hadn’t expected anything enough to feel too disappointed. ‘Well. Thank you anyway, sir, I’ll – hang on. Did you say welding job?’

4
Londres, 1900 (two years later)
The Psychical Society sent Joe an invitation to their annual dinner, again. It was tomorrow.
Apparently the Society, who had heard about his case from La Salpêtrière, were ever so interested in people with his kind of epilepsy. They’d invited him last year too, and the year before. They always sent him a free copy of their quarterly journal. He couldn’t look at them at home. It made Alice think he was dwelling on things he shouldn’t. Instead he stuffed the journals in the spanner drawer at work to read in tentative snatches over lunch. Everyone else hid dirty magazines there. The invitation, though, was too suspect even for that, so it stayed in his pocket, along with the postcard of Eilean Mòr.
The invitation had sharp corners that kept catching his hand all week. He didn’t know why he’d kept it. The Society was based in Pont du Cam, so he couldn’t go. It was seventy miles and half a day on the train away, and train tickets cost too much. And he would have had to come back here on the midnight train to make it to work on Friday. But he kept thinking about it. He didn’t normally go in for anything that called itself ‘psychical’, but the doctor at La Salpêtrière was no use, and these people did seem like proper scientists. He had ten of their journals now and everything in them seemed sensible.
He couldn’t believe it had been two and a half years since that morning at the Gare du Roi. He still felt like he was hurrying to catch up with himself and all the things he didn’t know.
Two and a half years since the Gare du Roi. Two years and two months since he’d started work for M.